President Barack Obama and the 11 leaders of progressive and labor groups he met with Tuesday laid the groundwork for continuing a campaign approach through the fiscal cliff battle. Obama raised the possibility of a barnstorming tour to promote his position, while others in the room pledged to keep organizational pressure on Republicans to back Obama’s agenda.

Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, said Obama “broadly discussed” going around the country to “communicate to people what the choice is here. He feels very strongly that it will be a continuation of what the election was all about.”

And AFSCME president Lee Saunders said the coming months amount to essentially “another campaign.”

“What we’re going to do is to keep our campaign, keep our members mobilized and organized in the different communities throughout the country,” Saunders said. “We’re going into another campaign. We won the election but we’re going into another campaign now. Our folks realize that, they understand it and we’re going to be working towards that.”

Obama reassured the leaders during the meeting that he will stick to his campaign rhetoric. Upbeat throughout, several people who attended the meeting said Obama stressed that the economic system as it exists is not fair to the middle class and that the Bush tax cuts should not be extended for the highest income earners.

“He said he has a mandate and was not going to budge on that,” one participant said. “They understand, the president understands that he was elected because of this movement. The work of tons of organizations was really important. They want to see that same energy and effort go into mobilizing the public to demand protection for the middle class and a budget deal that will help the country in line with the values the president campaigned on.”

Obama’s team – which at the meeting included Vice President Joe Biden, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and National Economic Council director Gene Sperling – pushed the advocates to remind their constituents that the White House as published a budget and suggested they should get more credit for it, another participant said.

Obama’s most recent budget was defeated in the Senate in May by on a 99-0 vote.

The bulk of the collegial meeting consisted of the advocates rallying around Obama’s victory and pledging to continue campaigning for his policies through the lame duck session.

“Everyone in the room was talking about how we’re going to keep energy and focus and it wasn’t just an election, people are really going to be active in these days and hopefully just days and weeks ahead and that’s really much of the discussion,” Tanden said.

Deepak Bhargava, the executive director of the Center for Community Change, said he told Obama that his outlet will seek to put pressure on persuadable congressional Republicans to back the president’s agenda.

“We expressed our commitment to keep this campaign going,” Bhargava told reporters outside the White House. “We are not demobilizing, that we will have hundreds of organizers in the field to drive pressure, particularly on Republicans if they refuse to extend the tax cuts for middle class and lower income Americans. That is a critical decision that Republicans have to make in the next couple of months and we plan to stand with the president.”

The invited union leaders said they will mobilize their members to push Obama’s agenda.

“We’re very, very committed to making sure that the middle class and workers don’t end up paying the tab for a party that we didn’t get to go to and the president is committed to that as well,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.

That commitment, of course, is not unconditional. It comes with the expectation that Obama not cave on allowing cuts to entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and that he stick to his guns on refusing to allow an extension of the Bush tax cuts on annual income greater than $250,000.

Max Richtman, the president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, said he was “reassured” by Obama that any deal will maintain current spending levels for key entitlement programs.

And Trumka said Obama made it clear that he will have the wealthy, not the middle class, pay down the nation’s debt.

“The president, like we are, is committed to preserving tax breaks for the middle class and making sure that rich people pay their fair share,” Trumka said.